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Much has been written about the Túpac Amaru rebellion, which shook the Andes from 1780–1783. It was the largest indigenous-led anti-colonial rebellion in the Spanish Empire had ever seen and involved tens of thousands of combatants, affecting millions throughout the region. Charles Walker contributes to this scholarship by providing the most up-to-date and detailed narrative rendering of the rebellion and its aftermath.

In their introductions, Orin Starn and the late Carlos Iván Degregori use the terms “remarkable” and “exceptional” to refer to Lurgio Gavilán Sánchez and his memoir. This is not hyperbole. Gavilán joined the Shining Path as a twelve-year-old, fighting for three years. When members of the army trapped him on a bleak mountain peak, they took pity on the emaciated, lice-ridden teenager and at the last minute spared him from execution. He was brought into the barracks as a servant or errand boy but, showing his smarts and perseverance, impressed officers enough that they allowed him to become a soldier. This was not his last stunning transition. He left the military after seven years, just when he had a clear path to becoming an officer, to join the Franciscan order. Gavilán underwent the rigorous ordainment process only to leave the priesthood after a few years. He began to study anthropology and is currently a PhD candidate at the Universidad Iberoamericana in Mexico, where he wrote much of this memoir. It’s an astonishing autobiography, told with style and sensitivity, that illuminates much about late twentieth-century Peru.

The history of Tupac Amaru and his revolt against Spanish colonial order has been the subject of a good number of accounts. Historians focused on the colonial period and the demise of Spanish rule have often portrayed the so-called Great Rebellion as either a fruitless revolution or a pivotal departure moment for the subsequent process of independence. The literature on Tupac Amaru and the wider period of upheaval in colonial southern Peru is so vast it seems that there would be nothing truly novel to stress. Charles Walker has challenged this historiographical stagnation by providing new insights about the logistics, motives, and long-term consequences of the revolt for Indians, Spaniards, and everyone in between while offering, at the same time, a remarkably flawless narrative.

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Charles F. Walker’s book is a vivid narrative history of the Tupac Amaru Rebellion (1780–82), which profoundly shook, but did not ultimately topple, the foundations of Spanish rule in the Andes. In its ability to make sense of an extremely complex, multifaceted movement without losing the thread of the larger story, The Tupac Amaru Rebellion can be compared with Laurent Dubois’s narrative history of the Haitian Revolution, Avengers of the New World (2004). Like Dubois, Walker skillfully analyzes the perspectives and motivations—as well as the shortcomings—of the movement’s principal leaders, while also considering what led indigenous people to join en masse.

Appreciated among Latin Americanists in the United States andhighly regarded in Chile, Arnold (“Arnie”) Bauer taught history at the University of California at Davis from 1970 to 2005, and was director of the University of California’s Education Abroad Program in Santiago, Chile, for five years between 1994 and 2005. Well-known for hisengaging writing style, Bauer reflects broad interests in his publications:agrarian history (Chilean Rural Society: From the Spanish Conquest to 1930 [1975]), the Catholic Church and society (as editor, La iglesia en la economía de América Latina, siglos XIX–XIX [1986]), and material culture (Goods, Power, History: Latin America’s Material Culture [2001]). He has also written an academic mystery regarding a sixteenth-century Mexican codex, The Search for the Codex Cardona (2009). His coming-of-agememoir (Time’s Shadow: Remembering a Family Farm in Kansas [2012]) describes his childhood and was recently named one of the top five books of 2012 by The Atlantic. He has also written some 50 articles and book chapters and more than 60 book reviews.

From late 1780 to 1782, indigenous uprisings convulsed Andean society from Cusco to Potosí, presenting the most significant challenge to Spanish rule in America between the conquest and independence. During the past half-century, the “Great Rebellion” of the Túpac Amarus in southern Peru and the Kataris in Bolivia has morphed from footnote to central narrative in Andean history, generating a substantial scholarship; it is now treated as a major anticolonial revolt in the Atlantic world’s age of revolution.